TIFF 09: VENGEANCE Review

It's a tale of two John's in Hong Kong / French co-production Vengeance. On one side of the coin is iconic Hong Kong director Johnnie To, here tipping his hat to his beloved library of classic French gangster films while also delivering a film very clearly conceived as a primer to deliver the basics of classic To to a western audience. And on the other side is French rock and roll singer turned occasional actor Johnny Hallyday, who takes the lead role here giving To the authentic French lead he desires. And the two John's couldn't be any more different - one of them very good indeed while the other ... well, the other not so much.


Hallyday plays Francis Costello, and aging French chef with a violent past who is summoned unceremoniously to Macau when his daughter, son in law and two grandchildren are gunned down in a welled planned, professional hit. Though badly injured, his daughter has survived and she has only one request for her father: Take vengeance for me and my children. And this he does, enlisting a trio of hit men to track down and kill those responsible, taking up a gun himself to take part in the proceedings.

What Vengeance does well can all be traced back to the presence of Johnnie To behind the camera. The look of the film is gorgeous, every shot impeccably framed and lit. The supporting cast - littered with To regulars, anchored by Anthony Wong and Simon Yam - oozes style and menace, the epitome of slick, hard boiled violence. The action and gun play perfectly balances style and brutality, massive sprays of bullets captured in meticulous slow motion. The major set pieces are stunning, one in particular - Anthony Wong's dramatic final stand - instantly entering into the canon of classic Hong Kong cinema. Is it reductive of To's previous work? Yes, absolutely, but that's hardly a reasonable criticism of a film that exists precisely to deliver a primer of Johnnie To basics to neophytes. In every area that To controls, the film works and works very well.

And then there's the other John, Johnny Hallyday in the lead role. As good as To is in his role, Hallyday is bad in his. Despite a fascinating look on camera, Hallyday possesses all the charisma of a stick of wood. Some may be tempted to explain away his performance woes as a by-product of working dominantly in English here but his work in French is every bit as bad, every line delivered in an identical monotone that leaves you wondering if he was simply reading - poorly reading - cue cards held off-camera having not bothered to actually learn any of his lines at all. Hallyday is such a vacuum of charisma, in fact, that he drains out all of those surrounding him as well, even accomplished veteran players such as Anthony Wong - who can perform perfectly well in English, thanks, he's proven it several times - floundering in their scenes with Hallyday as the Frenchman simply gives them nothing at all to work with. Hallyday was meant to be the anchor of Vengeance and that he is, but rather than giving the film a firm foundation he does all he can to simply drag it to the bottom of the sea. Am I being too hard on Hallyday? Are some of these issues the result of substandard dialogue and overly melodramatic plot devices? Some would argue that, perhaps, but drop a different, more skilled performer into the exact same role - make it a fully Chinese cast with Lau Ching-Wan in the lead, for example - and the film would positively sing. The script suits Hong Kong sensibilities, sure, but it's the actor who drops the ball.

And so Vengeance ends up posing a bit of a dilemma. On the one hand it is gorgeous to look at and would make a stellar demonstration piece for a high end home theatre. One the other hand, thanks to the weakness in the lead performance, it absolutely fails in its primary goal - introducing To to a wider audience - for which task a film like Exiled would do a much better job.